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my guess to what will happen to the suite
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“But after dumping Shake they have fallen so far behind both AE on the low end…”
I’m wondering what (in your mind) makes AE a “low end” application (not offended or anything, just curious).
I’m not a Mac user, but I’m pretty interested to see if Apple releases something like a ShakeColor hybrid for less than $2,500 US… this would make me strongly consider buying a Mac. But they should hurry, Blender’s Composite Nodes is looking pretty compelling… and it’s free. 🙂
Shawn
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Your comments are why I think they’d never sell the apps as separate programs. They each have a competitor that is better on the high end and possibly on the low end as well.
SoundTrackPro has competition from Apple itself with GarageBand on the bottom and Logic on the top. I’d think the entire STP would have to be integrated into FCPX or maybe they’ll add Logic integration such that they’d be tied to a common time line (Logic would “Plug-in” to FCPX).
Color might sell as a “poor person’s” Resolve though. Keep in mind that a good colorist is going to need control surface integration. But even Resolve has a “poor person’s” Resolve which is . . . Free. Apple would have to once again have an app that integrates using a common timeline as a sales motivator.
Motion can’t compete with After Effects or Nuke so keys would be ease of use and integration into a common timeline. Motion still has potential to be very powerful and easy to use.
Compressor, in its current state is a mess. It has just about the worst H.264 encoding in the industry, can be unreliable talking to FCP7 and QMaster can have fits. Even with a major overhaul it would still have to be an integrated freebee as it can’t compete with Telestream Episode or Sorenson Squeeze. The low end competition is MPEGStreamClip which is free. Whatever Apple does, they’ll still need a free clustering, batch encoding tool especially if we are to take them seriously about file distribution replacing disk.
So STP and Compressor have to be integrated since there’s virtually no value as separate sales.
Motion and Color can go either way as separate apps or integrated. Motion has value as a “mid market” FX tool for those who don’t use high end dedicates tools and want a Mac UI ease of use experience. Color isn’t a very Mac like interface to begin with so Apple may weigh development costs vs price vs ease of integration.
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‘Low end’ was not in any way referring to the capabilities of AE. I just meant in comparison to the high end market, the big post houses doing feature films and high profile commercials, where Nuke has more or less taken over as the standard compositor. Shake used to have this position when Apple chose to kill it off. AE on the other hand is the standard application in the lower end of the market. But thanks to a maturing feature set, low price and especially the extremely large userbase AE is of course steadily making it’s way into the ‘high end’.
Stephan
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Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification. I should point out though, that AE has been in use on high end projects for a long time… just not necesarily for compositing. AE’s built in grain/noise tools and MoGraph capabilites have been a staple in Hollywood for years… though most post houses haven’t liked talking about that in the past. Things are changing though, as the CS5 Suite has been getting a better reputation, boutique houses are getting less shy about admitting their use of AE and PP. Truthfully, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if Motion was being used for certain, quick and specific tasks on big feature films… it just doesn’t sound as sexy as saying that ‘you’ used Inferno to develop and finish 30, 10 second VFX shots on Ironman V. 🙂
Anyway, as a Premiere Pro user on Windows 7, I’m hoping that FCPX will be as good or better than advertised… I’m even hoping for a souped up version of Shake, just to keep Adobe on it’s toes. Hopefully, Apple will even make a tool or a Suite of tools so good (and cost effective) that I will have no choice but to invest in a Mac and go bi-platform. 🙂
Shawn
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[Stephan Walfridsson] “they have fallen so far behind both AE on the low end and Nuke on the high end that it would take a lot of money, sweat and a miracle to catch up.”
Agreed… Much of Motion will be integrated into FCPX. If people can do basic motion graphics work without leaving FCP, ala Discreet, that is all Apple can do to ward off AE. Motion will never be AE, so make it work inside FCPX where it can help do basic stuff that can’t be done in FCP7’s horrific effects GUI.
Compressor can be shown the door IMHO, and with 64bit memory and Grand Central, there’s no reason why compression can’t be done in the background as long as it’s effectively “sandboxed”.
The danger of all this background processing is it can bring down the whole app. Hopefully these separate processes will work much like Log & Transfer does now in FCP7.
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[John Heagy] “Agreed… Much of Motion will be integrated into FCPX. If people can do basic motion graphics work without leaving FCP, ala Discreet, that is all Apple can do to ward off AE. Motion will never be AE, so make it work inside FCPX where it can help do basic stuff that can’t be done in FCP7’s horrific effects GUI.”
Actually, I think they are quite happy to concede this segment of the market to Autodesk Smoke for Mac. Keep the behavioral stuff from Motion and build it into FCP X. Want more? Buy Smoke. Right now they have a good synergy and the companies have a good working relationship.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
And in your crystal ball, what does it say about the future of motion templates? They are incredibly convenient for repetitive projects. If they are separate apps, it makes me wonder if they’ll talk to each other.
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[Ariane Fisher] “If they are separate apps, it makes me wonder if they’ll talk to each other.”
They are separate apps now and they talk to each other. At the very least it will remain that way but it seems possible they’ll be integration at least with a common time line.
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[Craig Seeman] “At the very least it will remain that way but it seems possible they’ll be integration at least with a common time line.”
Hi
I think that is very much a “faster horses” way of looking at it 😉
It seems that going forward it will be the core components of the OS (rather than separate applications) which will be handling everything – components like AVFoundation, CoreData, CoreAnimation etc etc.All that is required of a new ‘application’ like FCP X or son-of-Motion etc will just to be a GUI interface to manipulate the basic media assets using the OS-provided toolset.
So everything can only be ‘totally integrated’, and as a ‘timeline’ will be a low level ‘composition’, defined by its own metadata, any GUI can work on it any way you want.
It seems to me? 😉Obviously they have got to ‘make-this-all-happen’, which may take a while.
Possibly until 2013 according to some rumours…. -
Paul, that’s what I meant by common timeline integration.
I didn’t want to say that was “likely” because I’m not sure what’s likely given that Apple hasn’t mentioned or shown any Motion like features . . . except one big clue. When Ubilos demo’d moving the frame about, the key frame editor that opened in the timeline was like Motion’s expanded timeline. I didn’t notice any interface utility to open Motion specific assets but the beta version they were showing was from February apparently and others, having spoken to an Apple person after the Supermeet, said a lot has been added.
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